Venezuela Shadow War Escalates
Where's Congress?
CNN (“Exclusive: CIA carried out drone strike on port facility on Venezuelan coast“):
The CIA carried out a drone strike earlier this month on a port facility on the coast of Venezuela, sources familiar with the matter told CNN, marking the first known US attack on a target inside that country.
The drone strike, the details of which have not been previously reported, targeted a remote dock on the Venezuelan coast that the US government believed was being used by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to store drugs and move them onto boats for onward shipping, the sources said. No one was present at the facility at the time it was struck, so there were no casualties, according to the sources.
Two sources said US Special Operations Forces provided intelligence support to the operation, underscoring their continued involvement in the region. But Col. Allie Weiskopf, a spokesperson for US Special Operations Command, denied that, saying, “Special Operations did not support this operation to include intel support.”
President Donald Trump appeared to first acknowledge the attack in an interview last week that initially attracted little notice, though he offered few specifics, including when reporters asked directly about it on Monday.
The strike could significantly escalate tensions between the US and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who the US has been pressuring to step down through an aggressive military campaign.
[…]
Trump acknowledged in an interview on December 26 that the US had knocked out some type of “big facility where ships come from” as he talked about his administration’s campaign against Venezuela. Asked about it again on Monday, he said the US attacked “in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs.” But he declined to comment when asked whether the attack was conducted by the military or the CIA.
“So we hit all the boats, and now we hit the area,” Trump said Monday. “It’s the implementation area, that’s where they implement, and that is no longer around.”
One of the sources said the strike was successful in that it destroyed the facility and its boats, but described it as largely symbolic since it is just one of many port facilities used by drug traffickers leaving Venezuela. It also appeared to attract little to no attention, even inside the country, in real time.
Trump earlier this year expanded the CIA’s authorities to conduct operations in Latin America, including inside Venezuela, CNN previously reported. But even then, the US military only had the legal authority to conduct strikes against suspected traffickers at sea, not on land, as CNN has reported.
The Trump administration has offered varying justifications for the campaign in Venezuela, which has involved a massive buildup of military assets in the Caribbean. Officials have pointed to a counter-narcotics imperative, but Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles told Vanity Fair in an interview that the boat strikes were aimed at getting Maduro to “cry uncle.” The Venezuelan leader has shown no signs of relinquishing power.
That this has been going on for weeks, has now escalated to the point where we’re attacking facilities inside Venezuela itself, and Congress has barely made a peep is simply bizarre. While Presidents have been pushing the envelope on military strikes for decades, I can’t remember a sustained campaign like this without at least some fig leaf of Congressional authorization.
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Where are Wayne Morse:
“It is one thing for politicians here at home, safe in the security of their political offices to vote to send young American draftees to die in an unconscionable war in Vietnam, but it is another thing to be one of those boys. I do not intend to put their blood on my hands.”
and Ernest Gruening:
“all [of] Vietnam is not worth the life of a single American boy.”
when you need them?
Congress is vacationing (again). Congress will do nothing till a year from a week from today (maybe), but it will be ignored and the SC will undercut them.
The felon will escalate this war in the meanwhile and the situation will be more difficult to unravel.
Where’s congress?? is the right question. Why aren’t democrats in congress demanding something here???
Technically speaking, how is this categorically different from Obama’s drone strikes? Did he get authorization for those? Once Trump calls these terrorists, isn’t this just another front in the war on terror?
@Joe: Obama certainly stretched the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, the relevant portion which says simply, “That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons,” to its limits. But at least he used it against those ostensibly affiliated with Islamist terrorism. There’s simply no plausible argument that it extends to Venezuelan drug runners.
@HelloWorld: Democrats in Congress: “We demand Trump stop bombing Venezuela!”
Trump: “No.”
Plan B?
Thanks for that helpful clarification (really), James. My only push back is when has this administration ever limited itself to plausible arguments?
When the President is elected after being twice impeached, whilst being convicted of felony fraud, and indicted (pending trial) for Conspiracy to defraud the U.S related to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election AND for impeding the return of classified documents held at Mar-a-Lago, then expecting Congressional authorization in order to foment War seems somewhat passé. This isn’t about a President stretching the bounds of his War Powers. This is about a lawless President given license to stretch the bounds of his criminality into foreign affairs.
I have a couple gift links left for the month and Thomas Edsall has a good column in NYT today, Why does Trump get away with it? A lot of it is the obvious: SCOTUS immunity, nationalization of politics effectively taking impeachment off the table, collective action problems, what he calls “structural frailty” which in my mind is mostly lack of clear statutory limits and mechanisms due to lack of precedent.
As Edsall does, he quotes several academics and has a much longer list. Some valid, some IMHO not. some trivia, and some the seemingly mandatory bothsides.
@gVOR10: I think Edsall is pretty good, but I rarely have the time to read through his long columns.
@HelloWorld: why aren’t democrats demanding sanity, dammit, when we all know maga is batshit?